We, Who Suggest Ourselves
by Beacon515L
Summary: A prelude to a game that doesn't yet exist. A fanfic spanning over four categories yet having but a single universe. A totally pointless excuse to write at length about moogles. The wordiest fanfic you ever read. You be the judge.
1. Foreword

**We, That Suggest Ourselves**

**An FFT/A/2/XII/VS Fanfic**

**By Liam Greenough aka Beacon515L**

_**Foreword**_

To everyone:

I hereby denounce any claim to the intellectual property of Square Enix, being their games (FFT, FFTA, FFXII, FFXII:RW, FFTA2, Vagrant Story et al.), characters and settings. I do, however, assert my claim to the intellectual property of my original characters, my writing and my own treatment of their ideas. I also feel that such disclaimers on this site are somewhat redundant, being that the subject matter is implicitly derived from intellectual property not belonging to you, but I will put one here anyway so that there can be no confusion.

To the moderators, or anyone else who cares:

In my opinion, it is something of an oversight on the part of to lack a category for the Ivalice Alliance. I don't doubt the value of seperate categories - most people write to them anyways - nor do I lay blame. Trouble is, what I'm about to write isn't going to sit in any one of them neatly. The issue I have is that we have one world running through over seven games, which could mean I could pick any one of them to write about. Except I'm not writing about a game. I'm writing about that world, and to do that, I must approach the entire Alliance as a whole, for we must remember, there is no Ivalice without an Alliance.

This poses me a heirarchial quandary - I have a piece that that will, by its conclusion, have dealt with as many as four or more categories in the Games section, yet does not satisfactorily fit in any one of them. Having two categories is no more satisfactory than one, as neither sufficiently covers the scope of the fic, meaning whether or not I put it in the crossover section is of academic importance. Strictly speaking, the extent to which one could call this a crossover is limited anyway - it's about one world, one universe, all spread over several games.

So I've decided to compromise - as the major driving force behind the plot is based on concepts mostly from FFTA, I have decided to put it in there. Hopefully this will not offend anyone, but I am quite willing to recategorize if need be.

At this point, it is suggested that if you do not enjoy long, self-justifying, mostly pointless rants, you should skip to the first chapter (though as much of the fic tends towards rant, this is probably not much better an idea X3). What immediately follows is not actually a part of the fic itself and can be ignored if desired, it is merely here for reader interest.

To the reader who enjoys long, self-justifying, mostly pointless rants:

At first, this was never intended as a serious fanfic. The ideas it exposits originally started to take shape as plot directions for an FFTA2 fan-sequel, and its protagonist was originally supposed to simply be my dev-team cameo in the game as the composer. Of course, this meant anvillicious self-references; like a background in engineering and music, specifically, an interest in theatre organ.

Having come from a roleplaying background, it was not long before I stared seriously thinking about how my character might actually behave and what he might be like. These ruminations eventually led to questions, such as where he had come from, why he was there, why he built and played tremendous theatre pipe organs the likes of which Ivalice had never seen before.

I gradually became aware of the fact that I was writing a textbook self-insert. To an extent, this is to be expected of a cameo character, whose purpose _is_ to represent a real person behind the making of a work, but the essential difference between a cameo and a self-insert is that the former is more usually just a representation of that person, intended to simply reinforce the contribution that person made to a project, whereas the latter goes on further to state that they _are_ that person, and further acts as that person would in the fictional universe. It is a characteristic of those belonging to the latter that they tend to be shallow, omnipotent, and capable of working every little detail of the universe single-handedly into a vision the author finds appealing, however degrading to canon.

I knew the risks. If I proceeded with this line of writing, it could well be that I would write a Gary Stu, which would be an inexcusable abuse of my creative powers. Worse, by writing a Stu as a self-insert, I was systematically tarnishing my own reputation as a writer by equating myself with the Stu, making myself as a writer and a person equally deserving of its inevitable revulsion.

But of course, I suffer from that condition most any fanfic writer does, which is their primary motivation to write – sentimental attachment to my characters. Simply refusing to write them up isn't an option. In my own mind, that reminded me of a friend, who swore to me that she would be chaste just to spite her own children who would never be born. Her defence was, of course, that we who do exist have no real reason to respect the rights of those who don't.

What she failed to mention was that while this was true, we also have no real reason to _not_ respect them. A close look at her statement will show that it implies present tense, that is, we should only respect the rights of those whom we know currently exist. Leaving aside the whole question of even _determining_ who exists at any given moment, and even if we can ever actually be sure that _anyone_ other than oneself does in fact exist, her premise in and of itself becomes quite questionable if you define "existence" in practical terms, that is, the state of being able to interact with other extant agents. This working definition allows us to draw a distinction between people that exist and people that do not; namely, the living and the dead. Leaving aside the whole question of afterlife, we notice that the respect people have for others is not limited to whether they live or die. Quite prominently, we notice that people harbour a different kind of respect for the dead rather than the living, but not a lack of it. Additionally, it is observed that responsible, expectant mothers ensure that their home and livelihoods are, as much as possible, ready for the burden of children long before birth. In this case, we see respect for those that do not yet exist, despite having no real reason to (discounting the high, though not certain probability that the child will complete the transition from physical nonexistence to existence).

Perhaps political correctness is to blame, but it would seem that today, people are inclined to respect the rights of strangers more so than not, whether or not they have any real reason to, because it seems like the right thing to do (where I here use "stranger" in the abstract sense, where I here mean "one who cannot be conclusively asserted to exist on the same level as oneself"). Perhaps this uncertainty, this lack of reason, is the driving force behind it – as long as the possibility is perceived for something to exist, we choose to respect it, as it is considered a lesser sin to respect in vain than to not respect where it is due.

While I acknowledge the likelihood of my writing ever actually becoming physically real is astronomically small, that does not preclude my characters from potentially attaining some vestigial sort of existence. Fictional characters reside in the hearts and minds of their readers and writers. They are a metaphysical quandary – a person sometimes considered as 'real' as any other, yet abstracted in unreality, or more correctly, a different kind of reality. This reality is known as fiction, and currently all known fiction functions by stimulating the imagination to abstract the concepts and figures present in a fictional universe. It follows therefore that the existence of fictional characters is sustained by the reader's desire to allow them headspace, that is, to give them room in their imagination to live and breathe, as it were.

_I_n this way, particularly sensitive writers such as myself can feel quite conflicted about writing in general. On the one hand, one realizes that one has a power far greater than life or death over their characters – every writer can, through action or inaction, choose whether or not a fictional character gets to exist or not. Further, as fictional characters are almost always representations of people, it is usual for a writer to ascribe them the same, or at least as many rights as possible as a real person. This then begs the question – would it ever be morally defensible for a person to decide whether or not another may or may not exist? How then does a writer sit idly by and allow his characters no exposition, no evolution, not even an assertion of their existence, simply allowing them to fester away in the nether-regions of the brain?

A writer is a god. A writer is a god of their own imagination, of their writing, of the universes of which they conceive – universes which they have absolute power over, and universes which have no power over them. In this universe, a writer is omnipotent, for what cannot a writer write? A writer, however, is an imperfect god, susceptible to forgetting, mistakes and even losing interest. What recourse has his characters, then, when he turns away from them? If I may now, without offending people, use my own religion as an example (and the point I make should hold at least for monotheists; everyone else, I'm afraid, is on their own), where would we be if God turned away from the world, and simply refused to sustain our existence? With a word, He could simply blot us out, and we would be no more.

Why does God not do this? Because He loves us, and respects our rights as human beings, rights He Himself directed and ascribes. God does this because it is good, for God is good. However loose an argument theologically justifying morals may be, it may not empirically follow but the reader would probably agree that it would be morally wrong for God to turn away from us (notwithstanding the fact that since we define Him as good, anything He does is considered unquestionably good, as the definition of good is dependent on his actions). By analogy, it is therefore morally wrong for a writer to turn his back on his characters, for the relationship one has with one's own characters is akin to that God has with us.

It has taken me over a thousand words to say it, for I am an imperfect god who has little to no conception of succinctness, but this is the reason behind my continuing compulsion to write this fic – because I couldn't live with myself if I knowingly refused to. My characters deserve better than that and I will give it to them, come what may – even if I write crap, even if I estrange the fanbase, even if I get flamed, my characters will have an existence. And I will publish it, because when I cease to exist, as I inevitably will, I do not want my own mortal fallibility to get in the way of my characters' chance at existence. And for that reason, I share them with you, the readers, that they may exist in your heads also, and live long after I am gone in your hearts and minds, and perhaps your childrens' hearts and minds, and your childrens' childrens', and...

You get the picture. I feel bad that my characters have such a fallible deity to worship and depend on as their creator, so I wish to share that burden with you all. Call me a madman, tell me I need to get out more, but that's my primary motivation for publishing my writing at all. These are my beliefs, and I would have them respected, as I would have my characters respected, as I would respect other people, as you would respect other people. Because, as far as I'm concerned, that's the best course of action.

If you have actually read this far, I congratulate you for making it and thank you for persisting with me. If you considered it worth the time you spent wading through it, then you are definitely worth my time and are welcome to contact me, I should be happy to have some decent, intellectual conversation.

And if you did not, and just don't care for the way I write, at least be nice - this is my first fanfic, after all. Criticism I like, encouragement I love, but flames can only burn. And frankly no-one wants that, and I'm not going to pay attention if you do.

Saavy? XD

-Liam Greenough

aka Beacon515L

_Arguably a nutter, but a lovable one nonetheless. What, you disagree? Well, I'm flattered you think I'm sane. X3_


	2. Prologue

_The best laid schemes o' mice an' men_  
_Gang aft agley,_  
_An' lea'e us nought but grief an' pain,_  
_For promis'd joy!_

_Robert Burns, "To a Mouse"_

Six metres per second, north by north-west.

A physicist would look at such a figure and suggest that it perhaps described a moderate jog, or large, slow-moving vehicle. In fact, this particular velocity belonged to the small, Japanese-made hatchback which was crawling through the Mont Blanc Tunnel, crossing the French-Italian border. The occupants, both tourists, had been taking a scenic drive across Europe – they'd been on a gondola in Venice, visited Milan's La Scala opera house (and fallen asleep during a production of The Barber of Seville, to their chagrin), and walked through the cobbled streets of Verona (which they remarked seemed like "something out of a fairy-tale"). That which occupied them at this moment was far less interesting – the peak-hour crawl toward Geneva. The most direct route was to take the tunnel under the Mont Blanc mountain range, which had seemed like a good idea at the time. Certainly, the route, like most of Europe, was picturesque and the traffic, light.

Until they hit the tunnel itself.

The Mont Blanc Tunnel is reviled across both of the countries it spans at the site of horrific accidents and fires. Nowadays, it is reviled as the site of some ferocious speed limits, which at the worst times produces horrendous congestion. For this reason, the car, which had spent most of the day careering down open country roads at a hundred miles an hour, was now crawling behind ten kilometers of commuters.

As he crawled doggedly in first, the driver noted the multitude of shiny, new German-made sports cars, and how starkly they contrasted with the mass of steel and rust he sat in. Not that there was anything wrong with Japanese cars, but this particular example had a chronically overheating radiator that just smelled of failure (right now, literally), and the stop-start traffic wasn't helping. Warning lights blinked on, telling him it was the engine's time of the month.

"Oh no you don't, not yet... Plenty of time for that once we're in Geneva. Just hold out for a while longer and I'll make _sure_ I take you in for a service _this _time."

As the engine wasn't giving much promise, he turned to his passenger, sleeping next to him in the passenger seat. A girl of barely thirteen, her peaceable restfulness gave him some welcome solace – and a good reason to put on some steam. He smiled. At times like this, his sister was always a welcome comfort. Samantha by name, or Sammy to her brother, who used to pretend there was some sort of angel behind that pretty face and auburn hair. Nowadays, he didn't need to. In fact, given the extreme likelihood he was going to break down in the middle of a busy highway on a freezing winter's night, he could not think of anyone he'd rather be stuck with.

Just as he was starting to feel better about everything, he was nearly sideswiped by an irate Italian driver, who promptly gave him a piece of his mind, consisting mostly of vulgarities totally lost on the English-speaker. Returning his eyes to the road, he turned to the radio to drown out that black noise. Reception was terrible, admittedly, but with a little tweaking he was able to get a weak French station broadcasting a radio play. Though he understood as little French as Italian, he enjoyed the drama all the same, particularly the organ accompaniment.

He was briefly distracted as the traffic came to a standstill once more, and the temperature gauge hit the top end of the "NORMAL" scale. Nonchalant, he laid back and basked wistfully in the organist's eloquent grace, gliding along with the Tibia, cantillating with the reeds, quietly brooding with the chords on flute ranks. He himself once strived to play that same instrument with this elegance, this beauty, this grandeur – but now, that seemed little more than a distant wish, a dream he'd had as a child, a vain hope bequeathed by his father. A futile dream for futile men.

_Perhaps that is the reality of all music – what passion cannot it raise and quell, but come the coda, what does it all mean? What does it really accomplish? What is it worth?_

While he pondered this, the Corolla emerged from the confines of artificial lights and gridlock into the cold, starry night, and put on some speed. With good reason - Geneva was a good forty-five minutes away, but the car looked as though it might last thirty. And his nerves, less than five.

* * *

"Power at 2.5 TV, sir."

"Confirmed. Continue to rise until we reach 4 TV, then begin acceleration."

A team of physicists stood on the gantry overlooking the engineers at the helm of the largest particle accelerator ever built. At twenty-seven kilometres in diameter, the Large Hadron Collider was the single largest scientific instrument ever constructed, and a venture in which astronomical stretches of time and money had been invested over the decades put into its construction and use. Its job, put simply – to make a pair of atoms go really, really fast around a circular track, then a bigger circular track, before letting them run into each other and obliterate themselves in a spectacular explosion that no-one can actually physically see. In more scientific terms, the rationale was that it could produce extremely fast, high-energy collisions which could be used to further our understanding of physics at the most fundamental level – particularly in the field known popularly as quantum physics. The latter interpretation was the one most competent physicists agreed with, and their work with the Collider worked towards the advancement of science and the betterment of mankind. The former interpretation was that which this particular team were more usually associated with, who, as one particularly shrewd reporter had it, were little more than "boys with multi-billion dollar psuedoscientific toys." Whilst they would never admit it, the reporter wasn't wrong – rather than critically examining their figures to work out what they could do better, as per normal scientific method, they simply turned the power up to eleven just to see what would happen without any real justifications or aims. Whether or not bigger collisions meant better results, no-one could say, but bizzarely, some believed that surely, this was the truest science – a journey into the unknown, for the betterment of mankind, an intrepid group of adventurers takes up the mantle of their magnificent machine and dances with the divine beyond.

These quaint, flowery musings belonged to a senior physicist on the gantry, an Edgar Burkhalter. A Swiss native, the extent to which he could be referred to as a scientist depended largely on interpretation, or indeed, who you asked – though in the interests of political correctness, the media addressed him always as a "visionary," an "innovator," or "the guy with huge ideas." In this way, his detractors were satisfied he wasn't getting undue credit, without going so far as denigration.

Of course, it is well-known that the real world frowns on quaint, flowery musings, or indeed, any sort of rational, meaningful contemplation, so it would come to the reader as no surprise that reality decided to throw some spontaneous happening at Burkhalter to cut them short as abruptly as possible.

"Er… sir? Do you want to introduce matter now?"

When flowery musings are abruptly cut short by throwing spontaneous happenings at them, said abruptly cut-short muser tends to resent the object of said happenings. Here, the object was a junior assistant physicist, simply carrying out the instructions Burkhalter had given him. He got a gruff "Hrmph!" for his trouble, before Burkhalter consented. The physicist relayed his instructions to the technicians, who prepared the first-stage accelerators for introduction of matter. Burkhalter lapsed back out of touch with reality again, imagining the acclaim his discovery of the Higgs Boson would bring him. How much more comfortable he felt, surrounded by supposed and suggested images of his adoring fans, his detractors repentant, all the nations singing his praises. Certainly, more comfortable than he actually was, in that cold, steel Faraday cage, surrounded by older men, uncomfortable amounts of noise and lots of electronic displays telling him things he should probably better understand. But no, that wasn't real, he thought - the truest reality was in his head, that which he was working to bring to fruition.

Soon enough, there would be no difference.

* * *

Among the range of noises that a Japanese-made small-bore petrol-driven engine can make, one should not find anything that sounds even remotely like an angle-grinder. This, of course, assumes the car is even slightly roadworthy, which of course, was not the case with the hatchback moving unusually slowly for the reasonably fast-moving Swiss highway it had been crawling along the side of. In fact, at this moment, one might even say it wasn't moving at all.

Any number of causes could probably be imagined for the stoppage, although the oil-covered windscreen and smoke pouring out of the bonnet probably gave it away. As a result, the driver had left the vehicle, and dived into the acrid plume armed with nothing more glamorous than a few spanners and a rag.

Though ordinarily a reasonably sound sleeper, Sammy had been sharply awoken by the keening racket of the dying engine, and when she noticed that she was in the car alone and couldn't see out of the windscreen, she got up for a look. Even without any technical expertise, it was clear things were not looking good.

"Liam!"

A few seconds later, her brother emerged from the smoke, easing up somewhat but still billowing out like a chimney-stack. Sammy's usually cheery demeanor caved in as he broke the news to her.

"She's beyond my help now, I reckon. I don't think I can get her up and running again."

Sam squeaked, terrified at the prospect of what that meant for them. Picking up on her distress, Liam walked up to her, drawing her in a big hug – a traditional parental remedy for a distressed infant. Returning the hug, she sobbed for a bit into his chest before he directed her back into the car.

Liam sighed. He felt a bit responsible for this mess, since he hadn't planned on the weather being so bad, or on having to go through Switzerland, least of all, heading back to St. Ives on half a day's notice.

_But no, don't think about that. Least of all, that._

He wiped his face with the rag and stepped back into the car, reclining the seat. His watch ticked over to six, and the raging whiteness surrounding them just got thicker and colder. Again sighing, he lay back in his seat, until he felt, quite unexpectedly, some warmth. Sam had nuzzled up against him, trying for sleep.

He sighed one more time, but this time it was a happy kind of sigh, in the manner of a parent beholding an infant, his problems and toils forgotten awhile. As Liam himself started on his journey across that chasm between the conscious and the unconscious, he thanked whatever God it was he believed in for giving him someone so rewarding to look out for. He returned her affections with a gentle hug, and closed his eyes, at peace.

With that final thought, sleep took him, and his journey into the unconscious was complete. And perhaps it is a shame that in these final thoughts, the possibility of never returning from that journey never once crossed his mind. Not least because he would not.

* * *

Klaxons are, by all accounts, very unpleasant to have to listen to.

This is, of course, entirely by design. The purpose of a klaxon is to produce a loud, unsettling racket, to suggest to any who hear it that there is a possibility of something being quite dreadfully out of order in their vicinity. They are the modern war-horn, a call to arms. A signal that the time for action is now.

In this case, the time for action really was long past. What had originally been planned as a simple collision experiment well within safety parameters had suddenly become an out-of-control maelstrom of inoperative controls, botched evacuation and a twenty-seven kilometer toroid steadily accumulating an electrical charge at a rate several orders of magnitude greater than the total electrical generation capacity of the human race. It would be so very easy to put all of this down to gross negligence - easy for the public to believe, especially the families of the variously electrocuted or irradiated technicians. Not so for the ten or so people in a lead-screened electrically-isolated Faraday cage – they knew better. But that didn't matter, because nine of them were dead anyway.

Largely responsible for the spontaneous termination of their vitals was a smoking handgun, clip half-empty. It was now sitting on a table, next to a cup of coffee being intermittently sipped at by a very morose-looking senior physicist. His mood had less to do with the fact that he had killed nine people in cold blood once they'd found out he'd sent the other hundred or so staff to their deaths, and more to do with the fact that this whole science-y experiment-y thing was taking ages. He knew it was going to take time, and the monitor in front of him was giving him a very good indication of just how much time that would be, but… it just seemed quite a bit longer than he had expected. As the possibility of a Lorentz contraction crossed his mind, he recalled Einstein, on relativity.

"_When you are courting a nice girl, an hour seems like a second. When you sit on a red-hot cinder, a second seems like an hour. That's relativity."_

Burkhalter often compared himself to the ubiquitously late theoretical physicist, and often turned to his words for inspiration. In particular, he felt vindicated by what he saw as Einstein's denouncement of what was traditionally regarded as scientific method, and his championing of scientific discovery as a fundamentally creative, rather than empirical discipline.

A fresh set of klaxons joined the din, waking said so-called buffoon from his stupor. This new set was telling him that the superconducting electromagnets were now inducing their own current in a positive feedback loop, due to the tremendous electromagnetic field now being generated inside the Collider. As a precaution, the circuit breakers between the reactor's turbine and the power supply for the magnets had tripped, preventing the current from reaching instrumentation.

Burkhalter smiled. This was precisely what he had been waiting for. Picking up his barely-touched cup of coffee, he walked over to the control panel for the breakers. He pressed the button to close the breakers, which immediately tripped again. He tried a couple more times before tipping his coffee down the panel, shorting the relays and forcing the breakers to fuse closed. The spectacular amounts of current now being channeled down those supply lines began to burn through the cables' insulation. This was fine, however – all electrical conduit through CERN was double-insulated, except for the large copper cables supplying the magnets with power, which had a single layer of extremely thick rubber insulation.

And now came Burkhalter's chef-d'oeuvre. Rummaging through the pockets of former colleagues, he located a cigar and a box of matches. Lighting it up, he proceeded to have the first, last and longest smoke of his life. It would be, simultaneously, the single greatest and most terrible thing he would ever do.

He was not smoking to celebrate his victory over the laws of physics, though, difficult as that must be while wheezing through one's first smoke. No, in fact, that he had closed all the windows and doors in the room was for reasons far removed from radiation and electrical safety.

His purpose was revealed when the senior physicist, who had by this time given up on actually smoking and was just holding the cigar in the air, suddenly became very wet and cold, courtesy of the sprinkler system he had just tripped. The system, which was equal parts faulty and sabotaged, did not trip the area where it actually detected something, but instead triggered every sprinkler on the premises. Every square inch of floor space in CERN was summarily soaked by high-pressure sprinkers. Every square inch, including the magnet cavities.

The rubber insulation on the cable was still doing its job, despite being near liquefied by heat. However, when the high-pressure spray of the sprinklers was turned on, it started to wash away, allowing unshielded copper cable to contact the ventilation ducts, aided by water, an excellent conductor of electricity. These were made quite cheaply from aluminum, also a reasonable conductor, and spread throughout the whole facility. Further, these contacted the steel frame upon which the whole structure rested, giving the astronomical charge the Collider had built a similarly massive path to ground. And, like all good electrical charges, it did go to ground – in a big way.

Anything in the vicinity of the wiring was superheated to a few thousand degrees, and anything flammable in the vicinity of the wiring spontaneously ignited. Just for good measure, the reactor, now coupled doubly to ground and this astronomical current, detonated, creating a small crater of a couple of kilometers in diameter, filled with radioactive sludge and waste. Most important, however, were the magnets, which also drew this massive current through them, inducing an equally massive electromagnetic field. The toroidal arrangement of the Collider's electromagnetic array concentrated the magnetic flux into a helix situated at the centre of its radius, creating, for an instant, an intensely focused electromagnetic field, on the order of several billion times more intense than a perfectly efficient conversion of all the Sun's energy into electromagnetic radiation. So intense was this field that it tore, also for the briefest moment, a rent in the fabric of space-time. And for that instant, that rent had the most intensely concentrated amount of energy to be found anywhere in the cosmos.

Now, dramatic as all this might sound, only three people were actually around to witness this death of the laws of physics by brutal, bloody murder.

And by that time, they were all dead.

In a now-dead car parked directly above the centre of CERN, two siblings died in each others' arms. The whiteness of the snow intensified yet more, but not because of the storm. It continued to brighten until it was several times brighter than the sun, before they were summarily vaporized by the intense amounts of heat generated by the action of the magnetic field on the relatively small amount of matter of which their vehicle and everything in it, themselves included, consisted. However, the average human reaction time is approximately one-fifth of a second, and they were dead in less than a trillionth. So, perhaps it is a small mercy that the pair were blissfully unaware of the fact that their lives had just ended in a spectacular implosion of matter and time. Because whatever came next, dealing with it would only be harder had they known.


	3. Chapter 1: Thunderbolt and Lightning

Rain fell thick and heavy as thunder shook the ground of Giza Plains. Visibility was bad enough, and most folk had already battened down and tried for some semblance of dryness and warmth. Not the young chocobo-wrangler from Rabanastre. She wasn't quite prepared to give up defying the raging elements just yet, though her fur was soaked through and she could barely see past her hands.

Taking a few deep breaths to centre herself, she drew her saturated coat and sleeves in close to her chest, keeping out what cold it could. Any minute now she was sure she might collapse, and she did not want to end up spending the night in the mud with a storm bearing down on her. Rain stung her eyes and went up her nose, causing her to sneeze every now and again. Between sneezes, she berated her charge for running off, as if it could hear her - every time hoping, in vain, that it could.

"Boco... where do you have to run to, kupo? What was wrong with home? You'll be far safer under shelter, kupo! Come home at once!"

Privately, though, she doubted it. While her house had been mostly spared, a violent gale had all but demolished the pen she kept her chocobos in, which sent the poor birds hysterical. After herding back together as many as she could, it was all Gurdy could do to tie them up and encourage them to huddle together for warmth. Unfortunately, the birds now had no roof over their heads, and it pained Gurdy to see them so wet and cold, but having no idea of how to go about rebuilding a pen during the height of a storm, this was as elegant a solution as she was going to get.

And then she realised she was a bird short.

It is observed that in normal people, negative emotions tend to be dealt with in a reasonably consistent, cyclic procedure. This is usually abstracted in well-defined stages, and presented as a cycle, known as the Kubler-Ross model, or more commonly, the grief cycle. The procedure is usually presented in five or six stages, depending on whether or not the initial shock itself counts as a step.

Even if it did count, Gurdy was long past that. She was currently exhibiting what is generally considered the most normal initial response to negative stimuli; that is, to choose to believe that it is not the case, a stage usually dubbed the denial phase. When in doubt, she blamed herself - miscounting, perhaps due to the storm, or perhaps because she was too panicked to count properly. Or perhaps having all the birds in one place was confusing her, or the fatigue was addling her.

_Standing out in the middle of a raging thunderstorm can probably do things like that, kupo._

In all her years, Gurdy could not say she had ever seen anything so violent, which for a moogle who regularly did business all over Dalmasca was most definitely saying something. This was doubly frightening when she considered just how close she was to Rabanastre proper, a city noted for many things, but never the weather. She could only imagine what was going on in the city, with mass panic and flooding and people getting lost in the confusion and being separated and drowning and buildings collapsing and all the other things and-

_Stop right there._ Gurdy steeled herself. _You won't find Boco thinking about all those terrible things, kupo._

With that, she realised that she had just accepted the fact that she had a bird loose somewhere, and now she was obliged to go and find him. She hesitated, teetering between denial and anger.

It should here be noted that Gurdy was not actually angry, though anger is the usual adjective used to describe the third stage of the grief cycle. The purpose of the anger phase is to motivate the individual to take a stand against the conflict, with the hope of resolving it quickly and decisively. As the grief cycle is an intrapersonal phenomenon, occurring deep within one's subconscious, it follows that the individual will usually act of their own volition, alone, shunning the company of others, eliminating the possibility of compounding it with further interpersonal conflict.

In this case, Gurdy did not have any company to shun, but whether or not that helped the situation is arguable. The upside was that, there being absolutely no doubt in her own mind that Boco simply must be found, there was no-one around to tell her otherwise, or to suggest that running blindly around an open savannah trying to find a single chocobo during a ferocious storm in the wet by herself was quite possibly not the most well thought out plan she had ever yet come up with, or to offer similar discouragement. Not, of course, that Gurdy was noted for thinking things through properly, all, or even some, of the time.

Which was why, at the slightest hint of a reprieve, Gurdy chose to act.

* * *

As any aircraft pilot will tell you, landings are the most dangerous part of any journey.

Despite the wealth of technical documentation and instruction available to pilots regarding final approach, it is almost always during a landing that the chances of disaster are at their greatest. Consider an aircraft, travelling at several hundred kilometres per hour through the air, flying over vast tracts of land, required to land on what must seem from the sky like the head of a pin, surrounded by a million other pinheads, obscured by whatever the weather feels like and coming up to meet you at a speed with a macabre semblance to oncoming traffic as seen by an unfortunate pedestrian. While these are similar phenomena, they do have crucial differences – such as the fact that a plane is considerably larger than a person, the ground is considerably larger than a car, the two are moving faster with respect to one another than on a highway and the initial distance between them is several hundred times greater. Despite being further away and in a relatively larger vehicle, none of this seems to be much comfort to pilots.

Perhaps people just aren't terribly fond of heights. This would make sense, as humans are neither volant nor especially fall-tolerant, and it would be sensible for them to instinctively avoid situations where their feet are not planted firmly on some sort of supporting surface. Perhaps also this is why the sensation of falling inspires such primal fear in people and the instinctive reaction they have to it is a very good way of jolting an unconscious mind awake. This is so that they can become consciously aware of the fact that they are falling, and perhaps do something about it.

Burkhalter could not do anything about it. The first few things he became aware of after the fact that the ground was rushing up to embrace him at some terrific speed was the fact that he was still wet, and it seemed that the sprinklers were still running. Before he was able to process either, however, his newfound momentum was just as quickly arrested. Mercifully, it had been conserved by a few conveniently-placed trees and muddy grass, and so nothing was broken. Fractured, perhaps, painful, certainly, ignoble definitely, but the former physicist was somewhat relieved not to be dead. Or he would be, if his tail end didn't feel like it had just been hit by a truck, a simile which makes a surprising lot of scientific and metaphoric sense when one considers the amount of kinetic energy he just lost and the manner in which he lost it.

_Hang on. Tail? Why on Earth would I think a thing like that?_

Actually, when he thought about it, the part of him that hurt most was at an area at the base of the spine, slightly above the hindquarters, which seemed to have taken the brunt of the collision. In most vertebrates, this was the location of the tail, and any vertebrate that had taken a fall like that would have crushed the tail, and probably would be in the pain he was in right now.

Burkhalter chuckled through gritted teeth. How quickly the mind can jump to absurd conclusions, without first considering the obvious, like the fact that humans don't have tails. With little else to occupy him, Edgar decided to prove something – for once, even with scientific rigour. The adventurous, entrepreneurial spark in him was rekindled, thirsty for discovery, for knowledge, for experiment. The curious pain around his hindquarters was a good place to start. Explore it. Test it. Verify. Draw conclusions.

Running his hand down his back, he travelled experimentally until he found the concentration of the pain, and yelped. Not out of pain, he'd expected that, but out of what he felt - a most definitely unexpected conclusion.

* * *

All well-raised moogles would remember their mothers telling them to avoid three things at all costs - getting wet, loud noises and anything that you are unlikely to walk out of with your pom-pom intact.

The first seems at a glance to be fairly mundane. The unpleasantness of being wet and cold is a sensation transcending virtually all species possessed of thermoception, and they would mostly come to the consensus that situations where they are likely to experience it are preferably avoided – although if getting wet and cold is all a given situation requires, they would probably also agree that this is hardly something to be afraid of. By contrast, moogles are, as a species, instinctively hydrophobic and cheimaphobic - though these are symptoms of several factors, rather than causes in themselves. Firstly, a moogle relies primarily on its fur for insulation; a property it all but loses when wet, and it requires several hours to dry sufficiently to regain it. While even slightly damp, a moogle is extremely sensitive to cold and is quite likely to develop pneumonia or a similar condition. Secondly, a moogle's inner ear is quite sensitive to changes in pressure, especially if a large amount of water enters the ear, basically impeding the function of anything otological until the fluid is cleared. This results in severe migraine, vertigo and temporary deafness. The resultant inability to determine which way is up becomes downright dangerous if a moogle is so impaired when actually immersed, and if they cannot regain their bearings quickly they are very likely to drown. Thirdly, moogles in general make for poor swimmers; their fur produces much drag, and their only limbs of any real use in water are their wings, which are tiring and inefficient enough to use for anything in general, even when they are not being depended on as the sole means of propulsion.

Of course, even if a nearly-drowned moogle makes it out of the water alive, they are typically left exhausted, vertiginous and freezing cold, completely at the mercy of whatever monsters or undesirable fortune chances upon them. For this reason, clans searching for lost moogles near bodies of water are usually looking for corpses, not survivors, hence why young moogle children are told to always avoid playing near water.

So, when it is said that Gurdy did not enjoy the wet weather, the reader should probably recognise that as a gross understatement.

Gurdy did not enjoy the wet weather, though this hardly did her reaction justice. Using both hands, she kept her ears folded over to keep out the rain, but that was about the only part of her not permeated by the icy precipitate.

It had not taken Gurdy long to realise that she really hadn't thought this through when she decided to go through with it. Moogles in general hate wet weather almost as much as they do swimming, and it was sufficiently wet that what Gurdy was doing really was closer to the latter. She had run, more to keep warm than to get anywhere quickly – that was her second mistake, though she had wisely chosen, at least, to not attempt flight. Cold, wet, and now exhausted, she stopped to rest a moment under a tree and catch what she could of her breath, conserving what little energy she had left.

It is around this time that the fourth stage of the grief cycle comes into play. With the attempt to forcibly resolve the conflict thwarted, a feeling of hopelessness overtakes resolve, and the individual sinks into depression, left without recourse, confronted with the inevitability of their situation. This is a sensitive stage, a precise stage, one where the individual must be left to their own devices and allowed to gradually swallow the prospect of living with their misfortune.

To say the least, Gurdy had a lot on her hands to swallow. For one, she was freezing cold, soaked head to toe, totally out of breath – she might as well have drowned - and to top it all off, completely lost. The rain had picked up again, going from a fine, icy spray that did just enough to freeze you to a raging tempest that made your face feel like it was burning to boot. In addition, the thunderbolt and lightning were very, very frightening her indeed – and not even because it was entirely likely to be the death of her.

Moogles in general are averse to loud noises. A moogle's eardrums are quite a bit smaller than a hume's, and hence require far less sound intensity to stimulate. This means that they perceive all sounds around six to seven decibels louder than a hume, and can hear some things humes can't, which is further improved by their long pinnae, which can give their hearing as much as another six decibels of gain while making it directional. They can also perceive some higher frequencies that humes cannot, owing to the shift to higher natural resonant frequencies of their eardrums with respect to humes, which, also as for humes, are biased towards the region of their own speech, which of course is itself more highly pitched.

This does bear some fairly drastic downsides. For instance, humes can listen to everything up to a loud rock concert before it starts to hurt, but simply yelling at a moogle can result in physical pain. For similar reasons, black mages like to make sure there's more than enough distance between them and whoever they're casting spells at, less to avoid striking themselves and more to protect their ears from a painful aftermath.

This was no Akademy student's Thunderga, though. Compared to the titanic fury of a real electrical storm, even the most powerful offensive magicks could be made to look like little flashy sparks of sound and fury - signifying nothing. At least, in the heat of battle, you can still be heard to scream when some hotshot smacks you in the face with a few thousand coulombs of electrical discharge.

Actually, Gurdy had no idea that she was screaming, though if she actually made it through the night, her throat and ears would be sure to let her know the day after. This was partly due to a survival mechanism – in most species with a larynx proximate to the ears (as in most mammals), a reflex action attenuates incoming sound pressure whenever one goes to speak, so that one is not deafened by one's own voice. Screaming can also be a reflex, typically triggered by pain or some related unwanted sensation. The purpose of screaming as a reflex is one's attempt to block out an unwanted stimulus, in the hope that it might go away. As part of this, screaming triggers the aural attenuation reflex quite violently, making one mostly unable to hear. This being exactly what Gurdy was, albeit unconsciously, trying to do.

It must be here said that what Gurdy was doing right now was done unconsciously, because it certainly was no result of a conscious effort on her part. The net sum of her conscious efforts had presently shifted from finding Boco to simply outpacing the storm, which basically meant handing over unconsciously to her instincts to run and keep running. As far as adventuring went – if this could be so called - instincts were mostly all Gurdy had, being that she dealt little with anything outside of some sort of settlement or the keeping of chocobos. Certainly, she made no habit of running completely unprepared out into a storm in the middle of the night, and having no conscious idea of how to proceed, her instincts mandated that she keep moving at all costs.

This was a good plan, as it helped to keep her warm and on her feet, though it had a crucial flaw – it would work only as long as Gurdy was physically able to comply. Trying to run through mud and rain over distance is extremely fatiguing, doubly so if one is not accustomed to cross-country running in the first place. Triply so if one is not the kind to think things through and decides to attempt a marathon in sandals. But worst of all, Gurdy was moving aimlessly, covering no real ground of consequence, and what little light the stars afforded her showed her no familiar landmarks or pathways. With literally nothing left to run to or for, her legs gave out, and Gurdy fell to the ground, panting.

She had failed. Utterly defeated by the elements and fatigue, she knew full well she could not go on.

_I... am so... stupid, kupo... why do I have to be so stupid... what would possess me to..._

Well and truly into depression, Gurdy could only weep. Even though the storm was moving on, and she was out of immediate danger, this was little comfort, as her body took the opportunity to notify her of every last little ache, pain and injury she'd caused herself. Do not mistake the meaning – although it was every "last little" ache, pain and/or injury, that in no way implies that any of them were little. In fact, when the adrenaline petered out and the pain hit full force, the sheer physical distress was paralytically agonising.

But this was not the only kind of distress she was feeling. Even as her ears stopped ringing and she even began to relax, an even more intense distress wrenched at her, and this was in her heart. A nauseating combination of despair at having been defeated so utterly by the elements, regret at having not tried harder to overcome them, pity for the poor souls who lost their lives in front of her, self-loathing at having done nothing, and a growing apprehension of what the morning would bring. Again, she tried mastering her feelings with resolve, trying to keep the evening's events from plaguing her nightmares. But they did, all at once, and she broke down in tears. Images of burning trees and flooded streets and drowning people and dear Boco being stranded somewhere and a million other things came at her like wolves, flaying her resolve and tearing up troubled dreams. It was more than she could bear.

And then she saw the tree.

It was an average sort of tree, but it was hardly any sort of tree. She recognised this particular tree, because she walked past it every time she went to the south gate of Rabanastre. Which meant she was close to the south gate of Rabanastre. Which meant people. Which meant help.

With renewed hope and a second wind, she staggered to her feet and approached. Barely did she take ten paces that she was close enough to see two figures curled up under it.

_People._ _Kupo-po, there are people still out here! They must be mad, or... worse..._

"Hey! K-Kupo, you there! Are you okay?"

No-one moved or said a word. More than a little concerned, Gurdy drew closer, squinting to make them out.

"Kupo-po! You can't stay out here, you'll catch your death! Look, we're not far from the gate, kupo, and the Watch will let us in, and we can stay with my fam-"

Gurdy never finished that sentence, because at that moment a bolt of lightning came right out of the blue and demolished the tree in front of her with an earsplitting clap, despite the fact that the storm had passed over. The shockwave forced Gurdy to the ground, and all but rent her eardrums and resolve. Blackness swallowed up the edges of her vision as consciousness slipped from her.

And as the storm cleared away and night became day, a moogle was still sobbing herself to sleep.

* * *

It is observed that in normal people, negative emotions tend to be dealt with in a reasonably consistent, cyclic procedure. This is usually abstracted in well-defined stages, and presented as a cycle, known as the Kubler-Ross model, or more commonly, the grief cycle. The procedure is usually presented in five or six stages, depending on whether or not the initial shock itself counts as a step.

Even if it did count, Burkhalter was long past that. He was currently exhibiting what is generally considered the most normal initial response to negative stimuli; that is, to choose to believe that it is not the case, a stage usually dubbed the denial phase. Indeed, his doubts seemed quite well founded for the moment – for there was no force on earth that the scientist knew of that could obliterate him, reanimate him and drop him from a height of several hundred metres – all the while bearing him some distance from Geneva, noting the lack of snow and presence of trees. Moreover, whatever additional force which had driven the overnight change in his species defied all contemplation -that kind of thing, he knew, simply could not happen. So, he rationalised – it had not, in fact, happened, rather, he was delirious or his senses were otherwise misled, albeit with some frightening thoroughness.

_Standing next to an exploding particle accelerator can probably do things like that._

So it was all just an episode of delirium, and he could just sit and wait it out. Sure, there might be some counselling involved, and more than likely some uncomfortable questions. But it was infinitely more plausible than concluding the fantasy his mind had created was real.

And so, he waited. But after a while, he found that just sitting in clay was not making him any more awake, just a lot wetter and colder. He would need to think of a different strategy to beat this delusion. Thinking back to his first fall, he remembered that he had been woken specifically by the sensation of falling, that is, vestibular stimulation. This told him that in this dream, he still had a sense of equilibrium, which he could possibly exploit in similar fashion to wake himself up. Moments later, a simple, somewhat (though not entirely) deliberate slip did the trick. Gritting his teeth from newfound pain, science told him the dream could not last much longer with all that going on.

He opened his eyes, and the rain beat down on them just as hard as ever.

The scientist was now faced with an uncomfortable proposition. The dream was enduring, that is, he could not seem to wake up from it voluntarily. That was to say, it seemed that this fantasy was, for better or worse, his reality for the time being. This would seem to imply one of two things - one, that his experiences were real, if patently impossible, or; two, he had in fact gone insane. Neither was easy to swallow - not least because he could do nothing to escape either possibility - and he spent a good few minutes carefully considering which he would rather live with. Slowly, he eased out of denial, but there was no anger - it was futile here. There was only depression.

It seemed, however, that even in a fantasy world, even Burkhalter's moping was doomed, as thunder pounded in his ears from the oncoming storm and the rain stung his face. Deciding it would be easier to mope if he found somewhere drier, he stood unsteadily and started walking aimlessly.

Barely had he taken two steps that a _wharking_ something ploughed straight through him. Thrown a few feet in the air, the impact winded him before he knew what hit him, and he landed right back in the mud, lurching as he was trampled on in creature's frenzied flight. Hurting in more places than he could name, Burkhalter conceded defeat, and let the black vignette around his eyes take him.

And as the storm cleared away and night became day, science lay in the mud.

* * *

Rain fell thick and heavy as thunder shook the ground of Giza Plains. Visibility was bad enough, and most folk had already battened down and tried for some semblance of dryness and warmth. Others ran for whatever shelter they could find, and on first glance, this appeared to be what the two figures sleeping together under the tree had done.

Curiously, however, there were no tracks in the mud leading to or from the tree, and discounting flight, which only the most foolhardy would attempt in this weather, there really was no indication as to how they in fact got there. Of course, they could have teleported, but no sane person would have put themselves under a tree in the middle of a storm.

The reason for this last became quite apparent moments later, because at that moment an enormous bolt of lightning demolished the tree with an earsplitting clap. The sound woke them both to a horrific scene – the wind howled monstrously around them and rain pelted their faces, and the burning tree looked like some sort of monstrous devil. Terrified for their lives, they both got up and ran, hand in hand, away from the nightmare. They had no bearings, no directions, nothing to go on, borne on momentum alone, more wading than walking through a tempest thick as oceans.

Eventually the younger of the two slipped over in the mud, only to be caught by her companion. He carried her for a while until they found some shelter. He set her down there as comfortably as he could before himself collapsing on the ground, panting. His task accomplished, and his will all but defeated, he succumbed to fatigue and gave himself to dreamless sleep.

And as the storm cleared away and night became day, two moogles slept soundly through the wind and the rain.


	4. Chapter 2: Very Very Frightening

Sunrise. Birds twittered as a light breeze carried leaves across an open savannah, south of the city gates of Rabanastre. The ground was damp from the rain, and the air was still slightly humid, and pleasantly warm. What clouds there had been had broken apart to reveal an azure sky.

This description is one that might be found, perhaps, in a travel brochure, or the first few lines of a film script, or as a clumsy attempt on the part of a fanfic writer to start another chapter. It is not, however, a description that befits delivery by a narrator who pretends to be objectively reliable, for it must be said that this description was at once entirely informative and misleading in equal measure. When taken at face value, there was nothing factually wrong with it – at the specific moment to which it refers, it was indeed sunrise, there was indeed a light breeze blowing (leaves moving therewith) and the birds did indeed twitter. However, these grounds are far too general and ambiguous upon which to determine that a morning happens to be favourable and life happens to be good – for at this point the lie makes itself apparent.

The morning was not, however, favourable in the least, and life was far from good as far as those who were around to witness this misleading sunrise were concerned. Though dawn typically brings light, warmth and invigoration to those who see it, today it served only to illuminate the devastation of the previous evening, a cold sun shining on tired people, who could only dread what the morn would bring.

The Watch knew exactly what it would bring, and for this reason they had requisitioned stretchers and white mages as they could find them, hoping to mitigate the aftermath of the storm. Most of their efforts were confined to the city bounds; indeed, the density of the population meant that a great deal of people were in need of medical attention. Structures too had to be watched; while the majority of the city was build from various forms of masonry, some weaker timber structures existed, and these in particular had to be evacuated until they were repaired and made safely habitable. Some buildings were completely destroyed; for those, no mages nor engineers were required; the only services needed in those cases were provided by an ordained Kiltias.

In spite of the storm's ferocity, the city itself had not suffered too greatly – masonry had little to fear from even the most violent of the elements. Certainly, anything left out on the streets had not survived well, and there was water pooled here and there, but this was more or less the extend of the damage. The lower city had been shielded from the storm itself, but it was now quite flooded, and drains were blocked, but efforts to clear them were working smoothly and the problem would soon be overcome. In fact, it would be surprising if the city was not largely returned to business as usual within a day or two.

_How lucky we have been,_ the bangaa at the South Gate mused. _It is almost as if the weather, for all its hostility, means to cause no real disruption…_

Quaint as the thought was, it was summarily contrasted with the watchman's uncomfortable realization that that the efficacy of recovery effort in Rabanastre city was probably not representative of similar efforts elsewhere, in particular, the Plains over which he was now staring. Every now and again, search parties would leave via the South Gate, and come back a short while later with another casualty on a stretcher. They were of all shapes and sizes, though there was quite the preponderance of the relatively short in stature, the moderately lagomorphic and the sufficiently weak to be afforded various societal concessions accounting therefor. This troubled him.

On this particular stretcher lay a young moogle, a tattered flower in her hair, unconscious and covered in mud, still soaked from the rain she had evidently spent the night in. Given that the watchman himself, even with his tough hide and warm cloak, had felt the need to retreat for shelter that same night, he was not terribly keen to suppose what this poor girl had been through, with her sodden fur and simple, long-sleeved garments. As she was marched in at a pace reminding him all too grimly of a funeral, he could only feel pity, and a frustrated self-loathing. While recognising that it was ludicrous for him to hold himself personally accountable for her misfortunes, he wondered yet that if he had worked a bit harder, just a _bit_ harder, she might not be in the position. Bowing his head, he returned to his job, his initial hopefulness of a swift return to normality overshadowed by a realization of the cost.

* * *

_Warm. Fuzzy. Nice._

Simple monosyllabic utterances, representative the internal monologue of the semi-conscious.

When one is waking, the first few things one becomes aware of is tactile and auditory feedback. This is because while asleep, these two senses remain partially active, enough to allow the sleeper to react to external stimuli and awaken hastily if required. Certainly, there is little call for vision when one's eyes are closed, and less still for gustation when one is not eating. Tactile and auditory senses are the principal two modalities utilised by the unconscious mind, because they are together the two most likely senses to detect predators while one is sleeping, be it through rustling, kinetic vibrations as they approach, the heat of their breath, their weight upon their prey, or any other telltale sign up on which they can pick (olfaction is a possible third, although its usefulness is typically confined to fairly specific cases).

Together, these senses also form a positive feedback network, allowing a person to either continue sleeping or begin the cycle of waking. The network is fed by the constancy of external stimuli; if there is no change in their outside environment, then they have no reason to wake, and vice versa. Here, with constants such as tactile sensations of warmth and fuzziness, and the absence of aural stimuli, Liam felt no reason to completely wake just yet.

A small change in that tactile stimulus, accompanied with auditory cues, followed. This consisted of something warm, fuzzy and in direct contact with him stirring, easing into a more comfortable position, followed by a contented, distinctly feminine sigh. Though not more than half-awake, Liam knew from experience exactly what, or rather, who he was snuggled against, giving him even less reason to move. He had fallen asleep next to Sammy, and they were still in that car of his, which he had to note was quite a bit warmer than he remembered – not that such warmth was at all unwelcome. Although this was hardly the first time he and his sister had cosominated – they did most nights – it had never felt so un-awkward before, so warm and inviting. So… soft, he might almost say fuzzy. Furry, even. Right now, he was in heaven.

Not so heavenly was the smell his nostrils began to detects as his waking returned his other faculties to him, one by one. It wasn't nauseating, but it was certainly… not like a smell he was used to, and certainly not one he could oretend was pleasant. It reminded him of a chicken coop, only… stronger, far more pungent. Like being _in_ a chicken coop.

And it was this that prompted him to open his eyes, and take in his surroundings. It became plainly obvious that he was not in a car as he noticed that the roof above him – quite aside from being quite a bit lower than he recalled – now appeared to be made of some shafted material, rather like leaves, or perhaps feathers. The odour he had earlier detected seemed to be concentrated in this material, which seemed to indicate an organic origin – perhaps a primitive shelter erected from natural, readily available materials. Certainly, it was by no means a part of any car he'd remembered falling asleep in.

Which could only mean he'd been moved.

Jolted conscious enough to be both alert and alarmed, Liam hastily took in what little he could of his surroundings, fearing the worst. Light was bad, though he was able to determine that this shelter was some sort of simple tent, not unlike a lean-to. It seemed to end above his head and below his feet, and to him those seemed to be the best ways out. With practiced care, he removed himself from his sister's embrace without waking her, and carefully eased himself out of the shelter, not wishing to test whatever structural integrity it might not have. And when he did emerge, there were yet more surprises.

He appeared to be in some sort of cavern. He could see the opening a short distance away, through which sunlight filtered in, briefly dazzling but subsequently allowing him to make out the dimensions of the enclosure. The walls had been cut rectangularly into rock, and seemed slightly worn, which led him to conclude that he was in some sort of artificial construction designed to convey some sort of eroding fluid; perhaps a disused drain or aqueduct. He walked towards the light at the end of the tunnel, and turned to face the shelter he'd spent the night in.

As he did so, he tried to think of a reason that one might erect an outdoor shelter of a simple, relatively fragile design in the middle of a drain. It defeated the purpose, really – all a lean-to was any good for was stopping the wind, of which there was none, and the rain, which didn't do a lot of falling sideways – or through solid rock for that matter. In fact, he realized that you'd be more likely to get washed out if the place was in fact a drain and flooded; in which case there was no way a simple structure like that was going to do anyone any good.

While musing, he tried to make out exactly how it had been constructed. He could not see it well, but there seemed to be a large pile of whatever the whole structure was made up of behind it, almost like it was leaning on it. Or… part of it. A smaller part of a larger thing. Or…

And then it stirred.

In Liam's experience, inanimate structures did not typically stir – at least, unless an external net force acted on them, exerted perhaps by the wind, or gravity. However, these forces had specific conditions under which they could act, and could only act in certain ways, producing characteristic kinds of motion. For instance, the force of the wind on an object could cause it to rustle if it had relatively little mass, or gently sway if it was heavier, but most importantly the force of the wind did require a gust to be present, and Liam felt no such thing. Gravity could act on an unstable object to move it into a more stable equilibrium, but ceases as soon as this potential energy is conserved by the ground. Clearly, it was nether of these.

This left Liam with not a lot of options. Himself excluded, the only other thing capable of moving things was his sister, who clearly could not be involved. Further, and notwithstanding the fact that he had not yet attempted the feat himself, he surmised that the section of the structure they'd been sheltered under was much too heavy to be at all moved even by the both of them, let alone the whole larger mass to which it seemed attached. The only conclusion he could draw was that the shelter itself, by means currently unknown to him, was capable of movement under its own power.

At this, the sun reached a position in the sky whereby the cave was lit up. Briefly blinded once more, Liam reopened his eyes to find some light shed on the matter – and subsequently wished he hadn't.

Before him lay an enormous, yellow bird. He would almost have called it a chicken, except that he didn't know of any mature gallinacean that turned out yellow, nor, certainly, any that ended up as large as a person - and this one was taller than him _lying down_. The shelter he and Sammy had been under had, remarkably, been one of its wings – either the bird had settled down to roost on top of them or they had found their own way under the wing - each a story as likely as the other.

Liam sat down on the cold, stone floor, trying to make sense of patent nonsense. His palms met his face, and at that point he became acutely aware that being spirited away with his sister to cohabit nonsensical drains containing giant chickens was the least of his problems.

On a human being, particularly a male, bodily hair can grow just about anywhere. There are, however, a number of well-known places it absents – among which are the lips, the soles of the feet and the palms of the hands. Indeed, so well known are these places that they are the subject of many an adage; chiefly that one who observes hair to grow thereon is surely mad. This troubled him.

This may seem puzzling to the reader. After all, in humans, it is perfectly rational – if it is observed that few sane people see hair on their palms, and if it is further observed that people of an unsound mind may not necessarily perceive things in the same way as sane people, then it follows that it is far more likely for people of an unsound mind to perceive hairs growing on their palms than those of a sound mind. So it can been seen that unless Liam knew he was himself mentally unsound, he had no cause for alarm.

But then, it was not his habit to fret over nothing, which meant something real had unsettled him. Some stimulus had set off a deep-seated paralyzing fear that all was _far_ from well. This stimulus had been tactile, caused by the collision of his palms and his face. Not that he was specifically looking to make the observation, but the moment he felt a soft cushion of hair between his cheeks and his palms, he knew something was up. And so, he pulled his hands away from his face and turned back towards the light.

What he saw was not objectionable either, as there is nothing inherently disconcerting about the appearance of a pair of white, digitgrade, fur-covered paws in front of one's face. Nor is it disconcerting to see them move in the manner of human hands, or even to note the sheer anatomical familiarity of an opposable thumb flanked by four digits. No, what was disconcerting was the realization that when they did move, it was by his own command, for it inferred that the paws, or hands, or whatever he was to call them, were somehow linked to him on a fundamental level, more than likely neurally. And, assuming he was not part of some alien experiment, or had been whisked into an Issac Asimov novel, the only other way he knew of hands being neurally linked to anything was for them to be a part of the same body, in this case, his own – and at this point, the disconcerting part becomes apparent.

Cognitive dissonance followed. For the uninitiated, cognitive dissonance is the act of holding two vastly incompatible notions in one's mind, or more specifically, the discomfort that results (anyone who has experienced a real dilemma knows this feeling all too well). The most popular and readily demonstrable use of the term 'dissonance', from which all others are abstracted, originated in music, where it refers to any two or more harmonically incompatible sounds in juxtaposition, producing a sound which is unsettling to listen to. Dissonance implies transience and instability, and conveys an implicit need to resolve into consonance – which is why it can be used for dramatic effect, as it prolongs the feeling of unresolved tension until such time as the musician should deem appropriate.

Here, the dissonance resulted from a fairly simple notion – Liam was human, and the core of his self-perception was based around this notion. As a human, he knew quite intimately what his hands should look like – skin-covered, four slender fingers and thumb, slightly marked under the left wrist where he normally wore a watch – all of which fell well within the parameters of human normality. So when he looked upon these paws, quite unlike anything a human could ever bear, and yet came to realize that they were indeed his, the dilemma emerged. And when these dissonant notions demanded resolution, the only consonance the dilemma could offer was for Liam to realize that one of the two notions was no longer valid. It did not take Liam long figure out which one it was. His entire concept of self-image usurped, he could only stare, eyes blank, mouth agape.

Soon staring became a rapid self-inspection. Looking down a shirt he did not recognize, he saw the same fine white white fur covering his entire body. At this point he noticed definite anatomical changes – his feet were, by proportion, longer, and his toenails longer still – more like claws than anything else, to match the shorter claws of his forepaws. He tried his paws experimentally, and quickly found that they were, anatomically, more similar to human hands than he would have expected, and he was somewhat pleased, at least, to find that he had no appreciable difficulty in getting them to do exactly what he wanted.

Mild relief followed from the realization that at least he had no immediate physiological obstacles. Indeed, there was nothing, as far as he could see, that was going to make survival difficult or impede his capacity to do anything he would need to, changed though he may look or feel. At least, he reasoned, he should just need to find out where he was, then find a hospital, get himself checked out, and get back to England. A nice, simple, foolproof plan. In nice, simple, easy-to-follow steps, no less.

Of course, it was obvious that he was more than a few steps ahead of himself and the situation. First and foremost, he could not forget his sister, who was still under the gigantic chicken. He blanched - getting her out from under that was not going to be pleasant or easy, but he reasoned that if he himself could sneak out without waking either of them, there was a good chance he should be able to manage without further incident.

So convinced, he crept towards the wing that had sheltered them, and felt around for her. While so doing, one thing he found that took a bit of getting used to was the feeling of having fur, a sensation, if one permits the cliché, quite unlike any other. When feeling for something, a human will directly apply his skin to a surface and move across it, noting how the tactile stimulation changes through time and hence deriving information therefrom. Liam found, however, he could gently feel the presence of something as it touched his fur before actually contacting it with his fingers proper, giving him a slightly broader picture of what immediately surrounded his hands. At the moment, however, this only served to unnerve him, as it gave him the impression that he was being clumsy and brushing things unintentionally – to say nothing of the sheer novelty of the sensation. After several seconds, more nerve-racking than they had to be, he found Sammy's shoulders, and proceeded to – in as dignified and gentle a manner as he could manage – drag her out from under the wing.

When moving a sleeping person (without the aid of drugs), the key is to be slow, even, and gentle. One must also pay attention to the reactions of the person you are dragging, being sure to stop and let them settle should they show signs of waking (unless the intention is to wake them, in which case, dropping is suggested). It was with this in mind that Liam managed to get Sammy out from under the the wing without incident.

Once clear of the bird, he carried her towards the light, and set her head down in his lap, pondering his next move. He had absolutely no idea where they were, and realized that he would sooner or later need to go outside in the hope of getting some bearings. With this, he realized that, much as he would like to, it would not be practical to leave his sister sleeping on his lap, and would have to wake her. His hand started for her cheek, but stopped sharply around the ear – for there was no way he could pretend his sister had ears like that. In fact, his sister – if indeed this was his sister - looked more like some sort of anthropomorphic rabbit than anything else, though he could still see the semblance. Taking particular note of the white fur and a little green ball of fur attached by a long, flexible fibre, and hence noting his similar endowment, he realized that she must be afflicted as was he. The matter adequately explained, his hand completed the journey to her cheek, and gently caressed it.

Sammy stirred a little, before opening her eyes a little, and nestling herself a little more comfortably in his arms. Almost immediately, however, they went wide as she saw not her brother, or indeed any face known to her, but some lagomorphic monster bearing down upon her, much too close for comfort. She made to scream, but Liam quickly covered her lips and drew her even closer.

"Shhhhhhhh! Sammy, it's me, kupo! It's Liam!"

One can imagine the effect these words had, or didn't have, on what Liam was reasonably sure was his sister, who started resisting horrible monster grappling her even harder. It was a struggle, but Liam held her long enough that she eventually tired, as she wordlessly took in her surroundings, trying for answers. Not finding them, she turned to the only thing she supposed that could.

"Kupo..."

"It's okay, I'm here now, kupo..."

She wailed, trying to disbelieve her eyes - and her ears weren't helping. "No, it's not, kupo! Big brother doesn't have fur!"

Liam cradled her head in his arms, and nuzzled her. "It's me, Sam... it _is_ me, kupo. I'm here now... there's no need to be afraid..."

To realize one's older brother has turned into some sort of animal is rarely a pleasant notion to digest at short notice, but in Sammy's case, it was at least made easier by that fact that he did not seem bothered by it – an impression Liam was going to greater pains sustaining than he was willing to admit. But it worked, and soon, Sammy was snuggled up to him, tears rolling down furred cheeks, seeking comfort now as much as answers. "What...where are we? What happened to the car... what happened to _you_, kupo?"

These were not questions Liam's idealistic side had hoped to be called upon to answer, though to his inner cynic they brought a wistful genre-saavy expectance. Still equal parts not trying to freak out and desperately trying to work out some rational explanation for what was a patently inexplicable turn of events, he hadn't had the time to come up with some readily palatable explanation for her sake, some hand-wave that might kiss it all better. No, right now, all Liam had was a few theories, fewer facts, and some overriding principles to uphold; chiefly, making sure that she was safe and happy. He knew that what next he said could either make her safer or happier, but not both, and so after a moment's deliberation, he capitulated, and decided that she needed to know everything.

"I've got nothing, kupo. I've got absolutely no idea."

These words pealed like a knell upon Sammy's now larger and considerably more sensitive ears, and were miles from any sort of comfort or reassurance Here they were, wherever that was, barely human if at all and now big brother was flat-out admitting that he didn't have the answers, let alone a fact or two. Suffice to say that this put young Samantha in a position she spent a large amount of time trying not to think about – and it took every ounce of her restraint to not scream in despair. She did, however, manage a quiet sob into his chest, sorely underrepresenting her feelings but a nonetheless appropriate and understandable reaction.

Not that Liam felt much better,for that matter – of all the things he had been trying to avoid, upsetting his sister had near-topped the list. He needed to stay strong for her, or at least look like he knew all the answers, or how to keep them both from harm, but above all, he had his honour, and would not lie to her – even to keep from her a terrible truth. In these unfamiliar surroundings, in an unfamiliar body, and so placed by means unknown, his ability to judge a situation and keep them both out of harm's way was practically nullified. At best, he could do little more than _hope_ nothing bad would happen until he found a way out of this mess, or at least, someone else who could.

But fate wasn't going to wait around for Liam to work out how to proceed. Instead, it came right up to him, and gave him a face full of beak.

* * *

_Ouch. Pain. Hurt._

Simple monosyllabic utterances, representative the internal monologue of the semi-conscious.

Suffice to say that Edgar Burkhalter was not a morning person. Suffice also to say that he was not remarked upon for his physicality; indeed, the fifteen-minute walk from the CERN staff carpark to his office was enough to see him gasping for breath. Suffice further to say that waking up to the sensations of being sodding wet, completely filthy and in a few too many kinds of pain is an experience best left to the imagination. Suffice finally to say that his experience was not helped by the all but irrefutable evidence facing him that everything he had ever come to regard as familiar and recognizable was out the window. His rational mind had no trouble accepting this; after all, it was a merely a consequence of the facts, but his subconscious was still taking its sweet time.

The other thing taking its sweet time was his body, which in spite of his efforts seemed perfectly content to remain motionless. While this was literally how Burkhalter, and indeed, the cynical reader would be to see it, the last sentence is somewhat unfair, because it implies that Burkhalter's body was willfully defying him. In reality, as it had no mind of its own (reflexes and other related involuntary actions notwithstanding) it therefore lacked such a capability; the issue was less one of willful defiance and more one of physical incapability. In fact, if one was to give credit where so due, his body was holding up laudably well considering the fact that it had been dropped onto the ground from a height not particularly worth contemplating and then trodden into the ground in a manner no more worthily pondered. When he thought about it, there were even a good deal of days reasonably fresh in Burkhalter's memory in which he could distinctly recall feeling worse than he did now; curiously, try as he might, the events that led up to these refused to resolve into any sort of meaningful detail, save perhaps for the remarkably consistent detail of having had a mouth full of liquid and not quite being able to think straight - not helped by the fact that he was presently reminded of both.

So he lay there, mostly unmoving, face down in the mud. Breathing was getting difficult, and he figured that, sooner or later, he'd probably just choke on the mire and that would be that. Which would be nice, in a way, because that would mean the pain would stop. Except then he remembered that he still had work to do, and this gave him pause. Fortune had handed most of his life to him on a silver platter, whether he wanted it or not, so he wondered now if that was to happen again. He was fairly easy either way; there was little enough he could do about it for his part, and he could not think of anyone in particular who would miss him.

_Actually, that would be a shame._ Burkhalter recalled his old dreams of delusion and grandeur once more, surrounded by equal parts disgraced coworkers and disbelieving critics. And through all the chaos and the hubbub of the media conference, he would climb up to the podium and raise a hand, and there would be silence. A pause pregnant with anticipation, for he was about to bless them with his gifts of words and knowledge. And there would be much rejoicing, and every man, woman and child would know his name. And most importantly, they would _all_ miss him, when the time came.

_When the time came._ Burkhalter had no time left now, as all the air in his lungs had been supplanted by muck. He could only lie there now, in the peaceful albeit slightly regretful contemplation in wait of death, wondering what fortune was hiding from him now. What the plan was hiding from him now.

His thoughts became blurry, less coherent, simpler, as he slipped back into the monologue of the semi-conscious, and then into the nihilogue of the unconscious. By which time it seemed to be all over.

* * *

As anyone who chooses to keep avian pets will attest, a face full of beak is not a pleasant thing to experience. Suffice to say that it is something best avoided, perhaps through careful handling or distancing, or better yet, not choosing to keep avian pets. Suffice also to say that the whole experience can be made even more unpleasant when the bird is actually so much bigger than you that the sheer force of a peck is enough to throw you flat on your backside, a lot less sure of which way is up. Suffice further to say that there is often a certain amount of pain involved in such secondary injuries, in addition to the initial trauma of the peck itself. Suffice finally to say that the whole unpleasantness of his experience was somewhat mitigated by the fact that it had perhaps mercifully left him unconscious before the pain proper could set in. That would be for later, if there was one.

This, unfortunately, left them both helpless, as Sammy had no means of defending herself, save perhaps for her voluminous screaming, here employed more as an offensive tactic. The young of many species capable of vocalization evolve instincts which take into account the fact that screaming can sometimes frighten away predators, as well as potentially alert any nearby help. Unfortunately for her, the only nearby help was presently incapacitated by other means, while the bird was only slightly startled and hardly intimidated.

A combination of this realization with a very painful rasp developing in her throat prompted Sammy to quieten down, succumbing to terror, trying to pretend she didn't exist. This too was a survival tactic, the premise being that if one pretends that one does not exist, the predator will be similarly deluded and will go away empty-handed. Strictly speaking the premise does not literally function as such, but the act of attempting to pretend one does not exist can help to suppress any unwanted movement or sound that might alert a predator to one's position, which leaves the predator with fewer ways of learning of the existence you're not supposed to have. This is all well and good in theory, but it does have a crucial flaw – it is completely ineffective if the predator already knows you do exist, doubly so if you lie in plain sight before it.

It was clear that Sammy's charade fooled no-one, but it did have a fortunate side-effect – by remaining deathly still and quiet, she was showing no sign of offense or danger to the bird, which meant that it was less likely to see her as another predator, and therefore decide that she was not a threatening problem that demanded a violent solution. Unfortunately, this left to her the role of prey, an arguably worse position to be in, and she could only hope for now that the bird was not immediately interested in eating.

And as its beak moved inexorably closer, Sammy realized that she had just second-guessed the bird's entire psyche with what seemed to her to be some quite remarkable accuracy, despite the paralysing terror with which the whole situation was fraught. By which time it seemed to be all over.

* * *

As anyone who wakes up on a stretcher will attest, being at once totally helplessly immobile, in rapid forward motion and unable to see where one is going does not make for a pleasant experience. Nor does the sight – or what one can see through barely-opening eyes – of vicious-looking reptillian creatures, glancing at you now and then for purposes presumably removed from the benign. And given the discomfort they seemed to be ensuring their quarry was in, Burkhalter had nothing to suggest otherwise.

Of course, he also had no way of resisting, and could only lie back as he was carted toward a high stone wall. The party slowed, and exchanged with a similar creature at a gate. In spite of all else, Burkhalter had retained his atrocious hearing through the metamorphosis, but even so, he was midly fascinated by their communications. He could hear modulation, articulation, perhaps even some syntax, but without doubt speech. Behind all that, he mused, there might even be a language he could learn or understand. Irrefutable proof of non-human intelligent life was now a possibility far that seemed more real than even he, or indeed, he realized, any scientist had ever dared to consider - for now he had the evidence barking in front of him, deciding what to do with him. If that wasn't scientific achievement, he didn't know what was, unplanned as it was.

While looking them over, it appeared that the four had realized that he was awake, and they promptly came over to him, inspecting him closely. It occurred to Burkhalter that the end was nigh – and then scoffed. The end had arrived no less than four times today, each time bungling the address and returning empty-handed. So rather than being struck with the rational fear of one who is about to die, Burkhalter sunk into indifference and cynicism, wondering just when Fortune would get sick of him already and be done with it. So one can imagine his disappointment when her head drew near to his face and tried for conversation.

"Sssalutationsss, friend. How doesss you fare?"

Words. Recognizable words in an recognizable tongue. _Well,_ thought Burkhalter, _perhaps not unmistakeably – I never remembered it being so full of sibilants._ He felt a hand on his cheek, and realized the speaker was brushing something off of him. "Apologiesss, friend, I did not mean to ssspit in your faccce. It tendsss to happen sssometimesss."

Running with the slightly hopeful assumption that he was not simply being spoken at in a language that sounded otherwise identical to English but actually meant they found him salivating and couldn't wait to eat him, Burkhalter became aware of two things – one, he was probably not being marched towards as grisly a death as first thought, and two, the creature had excellent manners. Manners implied social order, and social order implied a high degree of sophistication, perhaps even civilisation-grade. And that meant knowledge and information, scores of it, many times more than could satisfy his curiousity in a lifetime, if only he could gain access to it. And of all people, Burkhalter could be trusted to gain access to information.

He coughed a little before speaking, bringing up some mud, but managed. "Ah, it's no trouble... friend." His accent had mellowed a little, giving way to a slightly rounder, less continental form of enunciation than that to which he was used, but it did not seem to hamper the clarity of his speech – not as much as two lungfulls of muck in any case. "Tell me... what is this place? And if you don't mind my asking, who are you?"

The creature nodded, though mistaking his curiousity for confusion. "We've just walked inside the gates of Rabanassstre, friend. Do you know where are you now?" Burkhalter nodded his assent – a blantant lie, but he had more pressing concerns, such as acute pulmonary congestion – breathing, let alone talking, was becoming difficult. The lizard-man continued. "My friendsss and I are part-time watchmen, and we were called out to find where are the people left lying after the ssstorm. We find many victimsss, friend, and it sssaddensss us when we sssee ssso many hurt. But we are glad that you live, friend, and we think that a quick visssit of magesss ssshould fixxx you right up."

Burkhalter's comprehension had fled at the mention of mages, and he was now torn between taking them seriously and forgoing the entirety of his own rational experience, or trying to pretend he had the answers. Of course, this was not the first time he had been forced to make this decision, and he was finding it easier each time. Of course, the fact that he suspected that he might have more answers than he was prepared to admit did confuse the issue somewhat, but for now, he just relaxed as he was carried, a bit more gently now, towards promises of treatment. _And with treatment, perchance to comfort. And with comfort, perchance to some proper sleep. _ _And how long I have coveted some proper sleep._ And as the promise of sleep afforded him some welcome comfort, he was found to be doing just that long before he reached his destination. All his grief and pain seemed a distant memory, obscured for promised joy.

* * *

A small puddle was forming in the earth, a puddle of what was mostly water, mixed with a small amount of sodium choride, along with some other organic compounds. It was forming as a collection of droplets, which dripped down from a short distance above the ground to gather in a small pool of saline solution. In fact, there were actually two puddles, a short distance from each other – and all of this should give one a reasonable hint as to where these puddles might come from. The reader may here take a brief break to contemplate their answer, or if they should feel the need, read on, lest they need some more hints (having become stuck), the solution (having given up) or the rest of the story (having no patience for the writer's antics).

Saline solution is a chemical most commonly used to sterilise and clean light dirt and grime from an organic surface. It is particularly useful in medical applications, because it happens to be naturally occurring in most-carbon based life. Without exception, every single mammal ever to have lived will have come into contact with it at some stage – it is found in sweat, blisters, and on the surface of the eye. This last is the responsibility of the lachrymal glands, which secrete this solution in order to lubricate the surface of the eye. Notable is the fact that the action of the lacrymal gland is usually an involuntary reflex, brought on by abrasion or dryness of the ocular surface, or more dramatically by intense emotional triggers. Most of the emotions regarded as suitable triggers are negative, with some exceptions, and it is partly for this reason that the word 'lachrymal,' meaning 'of tears' is the base of the word 'lachrymose,' which means 'showing great sorrow.' Of course, sorrow is hardly the only emotion capable of driving a person to lachrymation, traditional misconceptions notwithstanding, and indeed there are a wide range of other equally if not more effective lachrymatory feelings – even positive ones, given sufficient intensity.

While there was no question as to the intensity of the source of the puddles, there was less certainty regarding the positivity – in fact, one might even go so far as to recognize despair. As the droplets fell, a pair of lachrymal glands were stimulated repeatedly by neural impulses induced by severe distress, found in a young, female moogle who was utterly convinced she was about to die. More simply, Samantha was now crying – there really wasn't anything more she could do, and even her brother couldn't save her this time. But the inevitability of the situation was made all the more unbearable by the fact that Samatha knew well that she was not yet ready to die. Bad things like that didn't happen to kids like her, she reasoned – and this feeble hope was all she had left to cling to, a simple, desperate, idealistic presumption. To her credit, her childish naivety did help her to sustain this quaint, flowery belief, as she had not yet developed the sort of healthy cynicism that normally develops moving into the teenage phase, and as long as she clung to that she could delude herself into thinking that everything was going to be okay. And as long as she kept this quaint, flowery delusion alive, it kept her from thinking rationally, from fully comprehending the hopelessness of the situation and the imminent threat of death. Of course, it is well-known that the real world frowns on quaint, flowery beliefs, or delusions of any kind, so it would come to the reader as no surprise that reality decided to throw some spontaneous happening at Sammy to cut them short as abruptly as possible.

It would seem that tactile stimulus enjoys going about hand in hand with unexpected and frightening circumstances, and they will probably make by far the happiest successful pairing in this fic. It is observed that they never seem to be able to get quite enough of each other – whenever something frightening or unexpected is about to happen, it can be expected that the earliest warning will come from some uncomfortable feeling, perhaps a change in temperature or similar. This change need not itself be real – the perception somehow remains, brought into being simply by fact of the imminent occurence of the aforementioned circumstances. This union has borne unto itself a child, who has many nicknames, but seems to prefer something along the lines of 'I've got a really bad feeling something bad is going to happen.'

The above is the sort of thing that a healthy cynic might think when a large, yellow bird gently nudges you with its beak. Most gallinaceous fowl that the human reader will be used to treating all objects of interest as edible, and pecking at something is usually a fairly sure sign that it has gained their interest. They tend not to have very many positive communicative gestures, having a social structure based around a literal 'pecking order' rather than a support network that a mammal would be familiar with; what few affectionate social gestures they have are, in any case, reserved for their own kind. So, two possibilities did exist – one, the bird was quite deliberately and sadistically screwing with her mind before it killed her, or two, the bird trying to engage her in a genuinely affectionate social gesture. Each of these possibilities are equally unlikely to have occured, as both demand that the bird have flaunted its natural instinctive programming. There does exist, however, a fairly simple test which can be applied to find out which of these outcomes actually occurred, which cannot be put more eloquently than a polysyllabic string of words, representative of the internal monologue of the all-too-conscious.

_I am still here. My God, I am still here! I am not dead, nor even hurt... and... what is it... is it trying to preen me now?_

Running with the slightly hopeful assumption that she was not simply being led on into a trap and the bird actually couldn't wait to eat her, Sammy became aware of two things – one, the bird posed no immediate threat, in fact; two, it seemed to have taken a liking to her. Her fears, at least for the moment, swept aside, her usual cheerful disposition came rushing back as a triumphant soldier rushes home from the battlefield, met with great jubilation and relief.

"K-kupo... kupopo, s-stop that!" She giggled as it made its best guess as to how fur is preened, clearly a task its beak had never been designed to accomplish. It had managed to find a spot beneath the neck where Sammy was quite ticklish, and as a result the ebullient girl was now trying to fit a gentle dissuasion between fits of raucous laughter. Once it took the hint, she returned the bird's affections in far gentler kind, scratching under the chin to relaxing effect, for which it _wharked_ appreciatively.

As she gently dealt with the bird, she noticed a small collar about its neck. Fashioned very simply from leather, it bore almost no distinguishing marks save one – a letter cut into the side. She had no idea of how she was to get anything done on the basis of a single letter, but she now realized why the bird had perhaps spared her – it had been tamed by someone.

Which actually didn't add up all that well when she thought about it, particularly with respect to the heap of brother lying next to her. At this, she realised with a pang of guilt that he had been lying there all the while, and promptly moved to check on him. The bird raised its hackles slightly as she approached, poising itself for another strike, but Sammy met its eye and firmly told it, "No, he's mine, kupo. You don't get to touch him." Humbled, the bird backed down obediently and allowed her to tend him. Cradling his head in her lap, she gently nuzzled his cheek, and was rewarded with a languishing groan as Liam repaid his earlier debt to pain with interest.

"Kupoooh... oh _god_, my head... "

She beamed mischievously. "Morning, sleepy-head!"

"Unhh, my head's a bit past sleepy, kupo... is that you, Sam?"

"Kupopo, who else would it be, silly?"

"Eheh..." He chuckled, pleased to find that she seemed mostly back to girl he knew and loved. Less pleasing he found to be the return of his ability to feel pain, which had decided that it had some catching up to do, and proceeded to describe, in the only way it knew how, every single damaged part of him in excruciating detail. "Owww... why did the sky have to fall on my head, kupo?"

This got a well-meant giggle. "Hehehehehe, I've think I've got a friend who can tell you all about that..."


End file.
